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In affiliate marketing, you can easily distinguish the experts from the noobs. Most newbies don’t do tracking. In fact and surprisingly, they don’t even seem to know how to track and don’t show any interests in tracking. Probably one of the many reasons why most “affiliate marketers” doesn’t really make money with affiliate marketing.

Tracking is essential, just like testing and tweaking, it helps us do well and improve our own campaigns. By tracking, we come to have an idea of what is working and what’s not working w/c will then give us the opportunity to tweak.

There are several tools that you can use to track your own affiliate marketing campaigns but you don’t need to use a lot. If you are with Pay-per click networks like Google Adwords, Yahoo Search and MSN Ad Center, you can already have that built-in tracking with them because they have the data, although only basic tracking.

You can also make good use of Google Analytics if you have landing page for the product that you intend to build in for long term. Besides being free, you also get to enjoy all the add-on tools that the Analytics provide.

Lastly, there is an awesome service known as Tracking202. It’s amazingly free and it’s a very reliable service that can pretty much do advance tracking for your campaigns. You can either opt to use the free hosted version or the premium self-hosted version (needs a dedicated server). Unlike analytics, tracking202 is nearly real-time with its flawless tracking and I don’t know any other program that does tracking superbly combined with reliability and affordable cost than the 202 product. It’s also fully integrated with the major pay-per click networks so you’ll not have any issue with it.

Not tracking is a murderous crime in affiliate marketing. Do not think I am over-exaggerating things here. If you’re not tracking your campaigns yet then start doing so now, and you will be ahead of many other marketers. What say you?

Most newbies in affiliate marketing have this dilemna, landing page! Yes I know how hard it is to deal with the design of each of your landing pages. Basically only few newbies know how to carve out their own design and if they do, they’re not even sure about its quality.

I’ll tell it quick, if you have $1000 to start up, I suggest you to outsource your landing page. Go ahead and seek for paid designer on elance and some other similar sites. I’d suggest you go away with webmaster forums as their designs are mostly crap. Luckily, I have a group of designers working for me and they always satisfy my needs.

So you don’t have $1000? or even $100? Pretty simple. If you’re going to use your own domain, I highly suggest picking WordPress as the CMS for your landing page. “But I’m not making a blog?” I know you’re not but WordPress itself is more than just a blog platform. Search Engines love it and the plugins are just too good to handle almost everything.

Here’s what I am seeing most people do nowadays. They get a wordpress theme, then tweak the theme itself and there you have it. A landing page! Basically all you need to do is edit your index.php in your theme to whatever you think it can suit your offer the most. Alternatively there’s the static page setting in WordPress that makes it easy as well but doing it can harm your rankings because the static page itself and the home page could be a duplicate. We all know Google frowns on duplicates!

Getting a suitable wordpress theme is important. It must suit what is the affiliate offer you are promoting. Remember, you don’t need a custom or premium theme. All you need is a simple clean, minimalistic one which makes the product you are promoting, the primary seeker of attention. The best directory of free clean themes by far is the WordPress Theme itself.

That’s it, you have now a landing page for your product. An SEO-optimized Landing page. If you have further questions or want to ask some clarifications, you can do so using the comment form.

Sending traffic to an affiliate offer is not as easy as it was used to before. Right now you just really have to endure with a lot of competition with almost any niche. The great thing is there can always be some other ways (outside the main ways) that can help us promote our offers across. One of them that we will tackle today is what is known as Video Marketing. Video Marketing is simply marketing an offer with some use of video. Although, videos have long been utilized in the internet, I actually haven’t seen a lot of people doing it in affiliate marketing. Here we go

The first step to do of course is picking an offer. My piece of advice is try promoting offers that are by leads and not by sale. What do I actually mean? Basically lead offers are offers that pay you if the traffic completes a short form or did something outside buying. It may cost nothing or some dollars to them. It’s harder to persuade people when they don’t need to pay a high amount. Unlike when you’re promoting a weight loss product wherein a user needs to actually buy it before it gets you a commission.

The next thing to do is look for articles in some of the famous article directories. You need to read at least 5 of them and try to understand it and impart the basic concept of it. Then we can start making a video. Now go to the landing page of an offer you are promoting and mention some of the things you understand about what you’ve read in the article you get. You can also try to bait them and so it makes a little interesting to them. Remember not to show the direct url. Its going to hurt your campaign, instead replace the url with the url of your landing page.

Sign up for an account on TubeMogul. If you don’t know, TubeMogul helps you spread your video super quick across the web. It doesn’t cost you to sign with them and its really worth it for me to say.

Lastly is to leverage the power of social media (listed them all here) and social network (facebook, myspace, multiply, etc). What I actually do is look for a cheap and reliable service in some forums that can do that work for me. If you don’t have any funds, then doing them altogether is easy anyway.

You then just only need to repeat it all over again as more videos means greater traffic. Let me know if there are some questions/suggestions.

So like what I have mentioned in my last post, I will show you the way on how to start affiliate marketing with absolutely no budget except for the food you will eat. so basically the more you invest in affiliate marketing, the higher the income potential can be. But again there are ways which costs you nothing and would probably help you get started. Just remember that in order to get the money you have to invest time since we don’t have the money we have to do what I call sweat work.

Here is how you get started:

Basically you need a site. A site’s domain and hosting normally would cost you $20. Since we don’t have a budget what we would do is sign with Blogger which hosts your site for free. The downside is that you will have to carry the name “blogspot” with your domain name. Now that you have a free blog/site, you can now choose your preferred template for it. Blogger has its own list of its template and I think the designs are professional enough to handle what product we are going to promote.

Now we have to choose what are the products that we are going to be promoting. In choosing this, I highly suggest you to stay away from the Internet Marketing Niche as I think its the hardest one to convert. Let’s say we pick Teeth Whiteners. Next is we have to choose the affiliate program to use. An affiliate network is basically the middleman between the merchant and us, the affiliate. I don’t really care what you would like to choose but personally for me Copeac, Pepperjam, and Azoogle do well. You may want to take good advantage with Pepperjam’s $10 signup bonus as I believe its a great deal for newbies.

Now we have a network that we will use to promote a certain product. The next part now is the content base. Review sites do well in this one and besides Google very much loves review site for its quality. What I would do is pick 2 different product in my niche and do a complete review of them. Just try to be transparent as possible and don’t just review it for the sake of hoping to get a sale. Try to put the things that you don’t want and like then insert your affiliate link into that. After doing the review, reread and then you can publish them now.

How are we going to promote? Simple, Article Marketing! Article Marketing is all about writing articles related to your niche and submitting it to high trafficked article directories. The directories are ezinearticles, go articles and etc. I have made a full list of all article directories here. Why is article marketina good way to promote sites? If you look at the list, you can see most of them have less than 100,000 Alexa ranking and almost over PR5 per each directory. It means the directories are well indexed by search engines and they have tons of traffic as well.

Now we’re gonna write an article anew right? Here’s the thing, you don’t really need a quality article to be posted. Remember we try to put our site as much as we can and we also try to build links and SERPS, so quantity is greater than quality. What I would do is search each directory for an article of the same topic. Try to get 10-20. After finding, you should REWRITE those articles in your own words/style and then submit it again. Yes, as long as its unique we’re gonna be alright. Remember we want a large volume of articles. Most people spend an hour thinking of an idea and another half an hour writing their article. If you’re quick and focused enough you can actually do 10-15 a day which means 70-100 a week.

How do those articles can lead people to our site? Simple, in every article there is an author box where you can put anything you want except for the affiliate link itself. So what we would do is put a link bait statement in that box that would eventually make a reader interested in visiting our review site. Besides clickthroughs, those link would also build our search engine rankings.

Back to our blogger site, we can just rinse and repeat what we did their. We can also submit our unique content to all social media directories to add exposure. This way we can have our site getting benefit three ways. First is the direct traffic. Basically because we have submitted a ton of articles in article directories, expect to get a ton in return. Second is the search engine benefits. This is also called Organic Traffic. Because we’ve built a lot of links facing our site we can easily get listed in major search engines for key terms. Third is improvement. The first few weeks/months is for testing and optimizing. You can always look in your Google Analytics to see what are the things to improve. Hopefully in the future I can make more advanced posts and more killer techniques so that it can help you out

That’s it. It’s a ton of work but as you progress more, you’re hardwork will eventually pay off with paychecks from affiliate companies. With my experience with this, it took me about 2 weeks before generating a sale. Of course, you can either do in shorter or longer period of time. It depends on your determination and other skills. You can ask questions in the comments section if you have some clarifications.